Author: Billy

As suggested earlier, in the wake of a major atrocity or tragedy, it’s safer to steer well clear of all forms of social media. There’s likely to be some truth available and even some cool heads but finding it amongst the virtue signalling and calls for further limitations to freedom will be nigh on impossible.

Some of the rubbish washes up on the shore regardless of how little time one tries to spend on websites and apps where it lives.

Blame is being directly thrown at a wide range of targets.

Let’s be clear; The person responsible for the decision to murder 50 unarmed men, women and children last week, was the same person who stockpiled the weapons and fired them.

Nobody else.

It’s a shame I feel the need to have to state that axiom, but it seems like a day doesn’t go by without a serious commentator claiming other sources of blame which, utterly coincidentally, reflect their previously-stated biases.

Examples follow;

1. Trump – the go-to blame focus for all that is bad in the world. The shooter’s own manifesto states that he likes Trump because of his ethnicity but can’t stand his policies. On that basis, anyone in the Whitehouse who was white might be blamed. Trump’s actions, words and opinions have been documented in detail for decades, yet there’s nothing we can point to encouraging violence against Muslims. Longbow.

2. Candace Owens – anyone who took the shooter’s claims that she was his greatest influence at face value is clearly not paying attention and has not read or listened to her opinions. The shooter is trolling the media and they’ve taken the bait. Longbow.

3. CNN – on a recent podcast, Scott Adams suggested CNN have contributed to the misinformation by focusing on race and identity. Longbow.

4. Facebook, Twitter, etc. – various political figures are stating the platforms are responsible because live-streaming functionality enabled the shooter to have a far wider audience. Do we think he wouldn’t have murdered anyone if he was unable to live-stream? Longbow.

Internet service providers and mobile phone network operatorstook the decision to block a group of websites, ranging from a financial discussion forum (Zerohedge) to the home of those crazy 4Channers. Curiously, the ISPs all decided to do this together at the same time, almost as if they were instructed to do so.

As the screenshot above points out, these smaller players had a minimal percentage of the traffic of the killer’s video compared to Facebook or YouTube, yet these didn’t get banned.

I checked this for myself and can confirm that, for a while, the block was in place but could be bypassed by use of a VPN. The block has since been lifted.

In other more ridiculous news, there’s a push to rename the local rugby team, the Canterbury Crusaders, to something less offensive to the residents of the holy land circa 1095 to 1492. May I suggest The Canterbury Cucks?

Perhaps while they’re at it should they rename Saracens to something less offensive to people living in Spain in the 12th century and the Barbarians to a name that won’t upset the residents of Rome living there in the year 410?

Bill’s Opinion

Shutting down speech, particularly theblocking of internet discussion forums (I want to write “fora” but I know that makes me pretentious) is not a road we should travel any farther along.

The New Zealandgovernment has already been tacitly involved in the de-platforming of Stefan Molyneaux and Lauren Southern and the Kiwi media were clearly incredibly biased in their interviews.

The Australian government has had three positions in as many weeks on whether or not Milo Yiannopolous would be granted a visa, despite allowing him to visit 2 years ago and, as far as I am aware, he’s not committed any criminal offences in the meantime.

Gavin McInnes and Tommy Robinson remained banned.

You don’t have to agree with anything these people say to question whether it’s a smart move to prevent the people who would want to listen to their views from doing so on Australian or Kiwi soil. They can still consume their output via the internet.

Blocking the websites where these views can be read or heard is impractical, as proven by use of a cheap VPN last week.

But, if you wanted to disprove the widely-held belief of the crazies that there’s a global conspiracy against them, private companies blocking websites would be about the worst possible action you could take.

I want these violent crazies to have a public forum to spout their views, for two clear reasons:

1. People who are sane can argue with them and show the insanity of their claims, and

2. If they’re speaking this shite in public we at least know who they are.

The alternative is that they go deeper down their rabbit holes and end up communicating via in game messages on Fortnite, private Whatsapp groups or a range of similar covert technology solutions. The conspiracy would be easily-believed by newcomers if that were to occur.

Finally, in all this blame-chucking, I’ve yet to see a single suggestion that there has been a failure of the domestic intelligence services. The killer was apparently prolific on the various Internet forums and platforms, what monitoring is in place to alert the security services of the threat? For fuck’s sake, it was all there in plain sight to anyone with a computer, they didn’t even need the police state internet snooping legislation of recent years to view it.

Those lucky souls in the lucky country have the opportunity to change Prime Minister in a few short weeks’ time.

The state of New South Wales getS to change their parish council too.

How exciting!

Except, Australians get a new Prime Minister every 18 months anyway, whether they voted for one or not.

Seriously, they do.

Of course, this leads to a surplus of ex-Prime Ministers. By May this year, the list of people who are still alive and claiming the not-insubstantial pension and benefits of the highest office in the land, will probably look like this;

Bob Hawke (run out)

Paul Keating (bowled)

John Howard (bowled)

Kevin Rudd (1st innings run out, 2nd innings bowled)

Julia Gillard (run out)

Tony Abbott (run out)

Malcolm Turnbull (run out)

Scott Morrison (bowled)

That’s a lot of pension payments, allowances for an office and staff and, of course, the free Qantas first class flights for life.

Thank goodness the Australian economy can afford it. Oh, wait…

Voting is compulsory in Australia. Let me repeat that; it’s illegal to not turn up and pretend to cast a vote in elections.

Chances are, you’re reading this in a jurisdiction where voting isn’t mandated, so you might think there’s something to be admired by this system.

Well, consider the probability that a voter of above average intelligence could navigate and make sense of this voting form;

If you choose to number your preferences “above the line”, the candidates then distribute your secondary votes as they see fit, should they not win a majority of primary votes.

If you choose to vote “below the line”, you can distribute your votes to each individual candidate.

Either way, it’s not clear what each person stands for or what commitments they would give to vote in a particular way should they find themselves in office. There’s an awful lot of single-issue candidates in that list, one assumes the well-informed “high information” Australian voters have read each and every manifesto and election promise these people have pledged.

Yeah right.

Bill’s Opinion

Many of the great leaps forward of the human condition involve a critical mass of the population agreeing to believe a man-made concept. The value of money is a great example of this; a dollar has worth because enough people agree it has. When that changes, the value of money collapses very quickly.

Democracy is a similar fallacy that works because we say it does.

On March 29th, 17.4 million voters in the UK may discover that fallacy isn’t as robust a concept as they previously thought.

With a system as laughable as this one, the people of Australia may not be far behind in that discovery.

Addiction is no laughing matter, so apologies to “Lauren” if she feels this is targeted at her.

The actual target is the (either) stupidity or mendacity of people like Paul McNamara;

I can’t comment on the cause of the other hundreds of deaths of homeless people, but I’m willing to bet my home on the fact that Lauren’s partner, Dean, didn’t die of homelessness. He died because he miscalculated how much (presumably) opiate he injected into his blood stream.

Paul McNamara either knows this and is tweeting his hashtags in bad faith or he’s a bit simple.

I’d like to assume McNamara is tweeting in good faith and is just a little naïve, but when one looks into the subject it becomes obvious here’s some significant obfuscation going on. In a trend that seems to be common to every area of public discourse these days, the definition of terms one would have previously assumed were universally-agreed has been subverted.

In this example, the term “homelessness” seems to no longer mean that someone is living on the street, in a doorway in the cold, but more like “living in short term accommodation”, which, although not ideal, is very definitely not the same as being exposed to the extremes of the climate and random violence.

In fact, finding reliable statistics on the previous definition of homelessness requires a search for terms like, “sleeping rough”. At which point, this research is found.

Its findings? The reason 50% of the people in the UK who sleep on the streets are not in safe accommodation is because they have mental health issues. The second largest cause at 43% is drug and alcohol addiction.

Bill’s Opinion

Claiming homelessness is the cause of deaths on the street is like claiming gravity is the cause of death of mountaineers.

An early contender for this week’s most pointless news article and even more pointless research has emerged from the crowd.

Disparities in social advantage within Sydney suburbs have been revealed by data that shows a pocket of about 80 households in the northern suburb of Frenchs Forest is the city’s most well-off locality.

Six of the 10 most advantaged suburban enclaves are located in the city’s north-west, but none are in the east, the Australian Bureau of Statistics new Index of Household Advantage and Disadvantage (IHAD) shows.

The second most advantaged neighbourhood was a cluster of just over 100 homes not far from Taronga Zoo within the harbourside suburb of Mosman.

Or put another way, “areas everyone already knew were affluent, are affluent“.

….is to invest three million dollars into a business built by a real estate “entrepreneur”.

Exhibit 1 McGrath Estate Agents

John “Million Dollar Agent” McGrath has presided over one of the most classic examples of wealth destruction of our time. I think the people we should feel most sorry for are those who bought into the bull traps in 2016 and 2017. It must have been like that exhilarating feeling a surfer gets as they catch a large wave but then realise they’ve got the angle wrong and are shooting to the bottom rather than gracefully gliding across the face of the wave.

Australia’s top Left Footer, Cardinal George Pell, was convicted of kiddy fiddling last week.

Actually, he was convicted weeks ago but a suppression order was in place preventing reporting. The hilarity of a situation where a judge believes the secret can be maintained after a verdict was given in open court shouldn’t be lost on us. Presumably nobody has pointed out the invention of “an interweb” since he/she finished law school?

Also, suppression orders didn’t seem to be of much interest to Australian judges during the Spycatcher debacle. What’s good for the goose….

So, the most poorly-kept secret since Rolf Harris is out now and a million column inches are able to be devoted to “whither the Catholic Church?” discussions such as this:

To be fair to Amanda Vanstone, she didn’t write the headline, nor anything near that sentiment in her opinion piece. Quite illustrative though, isn’t it, that the editorial folk decided that the readership’s feelings about the possible outcome of a legal appeal are of relevance to the case?

Helpfully, other writers have advice for Australian Catholic Church on how to stop kiddy fiddling problems arising in the future, such as this by Linda Morris, where she strongly suggests what’s needed is more women in senior leadership positions in the church.

Maybe that’s correct, or maybe it’s a call by an interest group to link a scandal to their single issue campaign. Certainly, a skip through Ms Morris’ twitter timeline doesn’t suggest any previous concerns for the health of the Catholic Church. Climate change, yes, things left footed, no.

Bill’s Opinion

It’s worth questioning the motivation behind angsty opinion pieces about a religious institution most journalists secretly despise. They might be written in good faith but they may also be cynical attempts to further their own desires for cultural revolution.

At the risk of whataboutery, has the journalist written similar opinions calling for a moderation of Wahhabism, for example?

Is Pell guilty and going to lose his appeal? I don’t know and neither do you, so how you feel about it is completely irrelevant.

Geir Helgemo, who is Norwegian but represents Monaco in bridge events, tested positive for synthetic testosterone and the female fertility drug clomifene at a World Bridge Series event in Orlando in September.

Now I’m really confused, but probably not as confused as Geir sounds.

We could wander down the well-worn path of laughing at the logical knots the Cultural Marxists tie themselves into trying to square mental illness as normal, but we’ve been there enough times recently.

What’s more interesting is looking at the inconvenient facts that undermine the claims that gender is a social construct.

If that were the case, and that a “male brain” can exist in a female body and vice versa, we might expect competence to be reasonably well-distributed across human endeavours not requiring the physical advantages of a male body.

Bridge being one such example. Chess and Scrabble are others.

Bridge then; we’ve just ascertained that the top player in the world is male, albeit a little confused about things.

I suppose there are multiple explanations that might help us understand what’s going on here; the first is the Cultural Marxist go-to answer that there’s no difference between men and women (thetabla rasaargument) AND that a pernicious patriarchal conspiracy has and is preventing any and all women from moving 16 chess pieces across an 8×8 playing board better than men.

The alternate explanation is that men and women have innate differences which manifest themselves at the extremes of the distribution.

Our razor suggests the fewest assumptions point the way……

Oh, if you aren’t convinced, go to the Twin Galaxies leaderboard for any arcade game hi-score and see if you can find a female name.

In case you haven’t realised it already, the organisations that most loudly proclaim their “Independent. Always” credentials are, in fact, some of the worst peddlers of fake news. At best, there is a distinct lack of critical thinking when it comes to reporting what clearly vested interests are pitching. No-one is really looking for the dog that isn’t barking……

Worse, there are people out there heavily-invested in certain outcomes yet being interviewed and given publicity as if they were a credible information source; Stephen Koukalous, for example, long property much?

The epitome of this Lord Haw Haw mentality is the Doctor of Property himself, Andrew Wilson, a man with so little credibility, Fairfax fired him.

Two recent outputs from this mendacious fool have prompted the creation of the “Are we there yet, Mum?” index;

Firstly, this one where he claims prices have bottomed because the median price at auction didn’t fall significantly since the previous week. Just re-read that again slowly…… (by the way, I’m pretty sure he edited this from an earlier version that even claimed prices were on the rise – if anyone can confirm my suspicions, I’d be grateful).

And this one where he claims a high auction clearance rate despite the glaringproblem that only 55% of results were reported;

Therefore, readers who are interested or mildly bemused by the current “completely unpredictable” housing bust occurring in Australia may enjoy this new monthly feature.

William of Ockham’s “Are we there yet, Mum?” index.

This is a collection of public data, which is intended to illustrate the bottom of the Sydney housing market, when it arrives.

The last one was created by looking back on the Core Logic website for the final print of weekly auction data. I stopped at August last year but will continue collecting it while on a dull conference call. Of course, if anyone has access to an Excel version of the back series, please do let me know and I”ll drop that into the chart.

These charts will be updated monthly, probably just after the RBA credit change data is published.

Any debate or discussion on dataset chosen, interpretations or additions/modifications are welcome in the comments section.

(note: there are 4 to 5 weeks in December and January where auctions volumes are too low for Core Logic to bother reporting).